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Dec 15, 2015

Intimations of Cosmotheism: Aviation, the Cosmos, and the Future of Man

Aviation and astronautics were once my
prime interests. As a student pilot, at the age of 20, when aviation was
much more dangerous than it is today, I concluded that if I could fly
for ten years before being killed in a crash, I would be willing to
trade an ordinary lifetime for that experience. In the ’30s, I assisted
Robert Goddard, the father of spatial conquests. Standing with him on
New Mexico plains at the foot of his converted-windmill launching tower,
it seemed to me that the greatest adventure man could have would be to
travel out through space.

What motivates man to great adventures? I
wonder how accurately these motives can be analyzed, even by the
participants themselves. When I think of my own flights in the early
years of aviation, I realize that my motives were as obvious, as subtle
and as intermixed as the waves on oceans I flew over. But I can say
quite definitely that they sprang more from intuition than from
rationality, and that the love of flying outweighed practical purposes —
important as the latter often were.

For instance, I believed that a nonstop
flight between New York and Paris would advance aviation’s progress and
add to my prestige as a pilot — with ensuing material rewards. In
seeking financial backing for that 1927 flight, I argued that it would
bring closer the golden era of air transport I felt was bound to come.
But without my love of flying and adventure, and motives I cannot even
now discern clearly, it was a flight I would never have attempted.

Then, as the art of flying transposed to
a science, I found my interest in airplanes decreasing. Rationally I
welcomed the advances that came with self-starters, closed cockpits,
radio and automatic pilots. Intuitively I felt revolted by them, for
they upset the balance between intellect and senses that had made my
profession such a joy. And so, as intuition had led me into aviation in
the first place, it led me back to an early boyhood interest, the
contemplation of life.

Gradually I diverted hours from aviation
into biological research. How mechanical, how mystical was man? Could
longevity be extended? Was death an unavoidable portion of life’s cycle
or might physical immortality be achieved through scientific methods?
What would be the result of artificially perfusing a head severed from
its body? This question, especially, intrigued me and resulted in my
working intermittently for several years in the Department of
Experimental Surgery of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical Research.
There, in collaboration with the great surgeon Alexis Carrel — he
developing the operative techniques, and I the design of equipment — I
constructed an apparatus that, for the first time, could pump synthetic
blood through organs without the entrance of infection.

To me, my years at the Rockefeller
Institute involved great adventures. They convinced me that the cycle of
life and death is essential to life’s progress, and that physical
immortality would be undesirable even if it could be achieved. I found
the mechanics of life less interesting than the mystical qualities they
manifest. With these conclusions, I began studying supersensory
phenomena and, in 1937, flew to India in the hope of gaining insight to
yogic practices.

But
the approach and explosion of World War II immersed me in military
aviation and international politics. Man’s fundamental need of survival,
for both individual and group, separated me from projects I would have
carried out in peaceful times. After our fighting war was over (I had
worked on the production of bombers and fighters, and flown 50 combat
missions with the Army Air Force and Marines), the cold war with Russia
held me to militarily oriented tasks — the study of new weapons, the
reorganization of the Strategic Air Command, the essential need of
developing intercontinental ballistic missiles.

I served for seven years as a member of
scientific ballistic-missile committees, first under the Air Force and
then under the Department of Defense. At the end of this time, with
Atlases and Titans in position, with Minutemen coming and Polaris
submarines under way, I felt our United States had achieved the
indestructible power to destroy any enemy who might attack. But I had
become alarmed about the effect our civilization was having on
continents and islands my military missions took me over– the slashed
forests, the eroded mountains, the disappearing wilderness and wildlife.
I believed some of the policies we were following to insure our
near-future strength and survival were likely to lead to our
distant-future weakness and destruction. Also, I was tired of windowless
briefing rooms, Pentagon corridors and the drabness of standardized
airbases. I wanted to regain contact with the mystery and beauty of
nature.

I resigned from the ballistic-missile
committee and declined a position in the new civil agency being set up
for the development of space. I decided to study environments, peoples
and ways of life in various areas of the world. To make this possible, I
returned to my prewar position of consultant to Pan American World
Airways.

Wilderness expeditions in Africa,
Eurasia and the American continents brought me to an appreciation of
nature’s extraordinary wisdom. I found myself in the fascinating
position of moving back and forth between the ultracivilized on the one
hand and the ultraprimitive on the other, with a resulting clarity of
perspective on areas between — a perspective that drove into my bones,
as well as into my mind, the fact that in instinct rather than in
intellect is manifest the cosmic plan of life.

Then, a few months ago, I received an
invitation from Apollo 8’s astronauts to attend the launching of their
mission to orbit the moon. This plunged me back into astronautics as
World War II had plunged me back into aviation, though for a period of
days instead of years. I was literally hypnotized by the launching. I
have spent most of a lifetime in close contact with test flying and
man-controlled power; but I have never experienced anything to compare
to that mission of Apollo 8.

Three miles away from the pad, where I
stood watching with free-from-duty astronauts, the size of the rocket
still seemed huge. When ignition came, clouds of smoke and flame churned
like a storm’s convulsions; and when the sound waves struck me, I shook
with the earth itself.

Above that flashing, billowing chaos,
the prow of the rocket rose. In it I visualized the three men I had
lunched with hours before, strapped into position like test pilots,
tensed to emergency procedures and to the dials of the instruments they
watched, men actually launched on a voyage to the moon! For a moment,
reality and memory contorted and Robert Goddard stood watching at my
side. Was he now the dream; his dream, the reality?

During the first seconds of the Apollo’s
inching upward, my sensation was intensified by a vision of the last
launching I had witnessed, that of a big military missile which rose
three or four feet, faltered, and then crumpled into explosion — an
explosion seemingly less violent than that smothering the whole aft end
of the Apollo.

My body staggered with the rocket’s
effort to lift above its tower, relaxed as it leapt upward into air,
thrilled as the ball of fire, with its astronauts, diminished in the
vastness of space. Here, after epoch-measured trials of evolution,
earth’s life was voyaging to another celestial body. Here one saw our
civilization flowering toward the stars. Here modern man had been
rewarded for his confidence in science and technology. Soon he would be
orbiting the moon.

Talking to astronauts and engineers, I
felt an almost overwhelming desire to reenter the fields of astronautics
— with their scientific committees, laboratories, factories and
blockhouses, possibly to voyage into space myself. But I know I will not
return to them, despite limitless possibilities for invention,
exploration and adventure.

Why
not? Decades spent in contact with science and its vehicles have
directed my mind and senses to areas beyond their reach. I now see
scientific accomplishment as a path, not an end; a path leading to and
disappearing in mystery. Science, in fact, forms many paths branching
from the trunk of human progress; and on every periphery they end in the
miraculous. Following these paths far enough, and long enough, one must
eventually conclude that science itself is a miracle — like the
awareness of man arising from and then disappearing in the apparent
nothingness of space. Rather than nullifying religion and proving that
“God is dead,” science enhances spiritual values by revealing the
magnitudes and minitudes — from cosmos to atom — through which man
extends and of which he is composed.

Forty-two years ago, bucking a headwind
on a flight in my monoplane between New York and St. Louis, I tried to
look into the future beyond man’s conquest of the air. As the wheel had
opened land to modern travel, and the hull the sea, wings had opened the
relatively universal sky. Only space lay beyond. Could we ever extend
our travels into space? If so, it seemed we must develop rockets and
their jet propulsion. Such dreaming and reasoning brought me in contact
with physicists, chemists and engineers in the explosives industry — and
eventually with Robert Goddard. Who then could foretell that, as soon
as 1968, men would hurtle around the moon and back?

Now, again, I try to penetrate the
future. What travel may, someday, take place beyond our solar-system
space? What vehicles can we devise to extend the range of rocket ships
as they have extended the range of aircraft? Scientific knowledge argues
that space vehicles can never attain the speed of light, which makes a
puny penetration of the universe within a human lifespan; and that,
therefore, cosmic distances will confine our physical explorations to
those planets which orbit the sun.

As wings and propellers once limited man
to earth’s thicker atmosphere, scientifically established principles
now seem to limit him to the space-territory of the minor star he
orbits. We are blocked by lack of time as we were once blocked by lack
of air. Mars and Venus may mark dead ends for spaceship travel, unless
we break through physical laws and construct still-more-advanced
vehicles.

But by establishing these new planetary
“dead ends,” are we cracking open the entrance to another era, as
aviation cracked open that of astronautics — one that will surpass the
era of science as the era of science surpassed that of religious
superstition? Following the paths of science, we become constantly more
aware of mysteries beyond scientific reach. In these vaguely apprehended
azimuths, I think the great adventures of the future lie — in voyages
inconceivable by our 20th Century rationality — beyond the solar system,
through distant galaxies, possibly through peripheries untouched by
time and space.

I believe early entrance to this era can
be attained by the application of our scientific knowledge not to
life’s mechanical vehicles but to the essence of life itself: to the
infinite and infinitely evolving qualities that have resulted in the
awareness, shape and character of man. I believe this application is
necessary to the very survival of mankind.

Science and technology inform us that,
after millions of years of successful evolution, human life is now
deteriorating genetically and environmentally at an alarming and
exponential rate. Basically, we seem to be retrograding rather than
evolving. We have only to look about us to verify this fact: to see
megalopolizing cities, the breakdown of nature, the pollution of air,
water and earth; to see crime, vice and dissatisfaction webbing like a
cancer across the surface of our world. Does this mark an end or a
beginning? The answer, of course, depends on our perception and the
action we take.

Every era opens with its challenges, and
they cannot be met successfully by elaborating methods of the past. Our
technologies become inadequate; but among our sciences — paleontology,
genetics, physics, astronomy, atomics — are those that still can point a
way, shaping concepts of life, time and space.

We know that tens of thousands of years
ago, man departed from both the hazards and the security of instinct’s
natural selection, and that his intellectual reactions have become too
powerful to permit him ever to return. It seems obvious that to achieve
the maximum scope of awareness, even to survive as a species, we must
contrive a new process of evolutionary selection. We must find a way to
blend with our present erratic tyranny of mind the countless, subtle and
still-little-known elements that created the tangible shape of man and
his intangible extensions. Through the eons these elements have raised
the human complex to a sensitivity which recognizes that both the
material and the ethereal are varying forms of basic essence.

That is why I have turned my attention
from technological progress to life, from the civilized to the wild. In
wildness there is a lens to the past, to the present and to the future,
offered to us for the looking — a direction, a successful selection, an
awareness of values that confronts us with the need for and the means of
our salvation. Let us never forget that wildness has developed life,
including the human species. By comparison, our own accomplishments are
trivial.

If we can combine our knowledge of
science with the wisdom of wildness, if we can nurture civilization
through roots in the primitive, man’s potentialities appear to be
unbounded. Through his evolving awareness, and his awareness of that
awareness, he can merge with the miraculous — to which we can attach
what better name than “God”? And in this merging, as long sensed by
intuition but still only vaguely perceived by rationality, experience
may travel without need for accompanying life.

Will we then find life to be only a
stage, though an essential one, in a cosmic evolution of which our
evolving awareness is beginning to become aware? Will we discover that
only without spaceships can we reach the galaxies; that only without
cyclotrons can we know the interior of atoms? To venture beyond the
fantastic accomplishments of this physically fantastic age, sensory
perception must combine with the extrasensory, and I suspect that the
two will prove to be different faces of each other. I believe it is
through sensing and thinking about such concepts that great adventures
of the future will be found.